The power of cross-channel location-based delivery

Time zone-based sending is nothing new to anyone in the B2C email marketing world – It’s a solution to a problem so obvious, it’s almost surprising it even has a name. You can’t send emails about a sale starting (or ending) to every time zone at once and expect people to respond to your message. And on top of that, we already know the specific time you send out a message can have a real impact on the engagement rate. Enabling to set up campaigns to “Follow the sun” as they say, is one of the most basic table stakes features of modern ESPs.

But just because it can seem basic and almost obligatory doesn’t mean it can’t be improved upon. This is something we’ve thought a good deal about — how can we utilize our platform’s unique access to your data in order to take time zone-based sending to the next level? And when we looked at the current landscape of ESPs and their time zone-based sending features, we saw some holes that needed to be filled.

While these other providers may offer you the ability to send your message at staggered times depending on where your recipient is, it typically comes with some downsides. For instance, many ESPs force you to upload your recipient’s location to their cloud data warehouse or, even worse, attempt to ‘discover’ the location of your recipient based on the IP address of their activity — which can be misleading or flat-out wrong.

The MessageGears time zone-based sending feature allows you to send messages when they’re most relevant for your user while also securing the location data your users have trusted you with. Simply select the local time you’d like the message to go out, and MessageGears will update our sending instructions without shipping customer location data out of your data environment.

And while most solutions offer a limited single-channel view of location-based sending, MessageGears’ cross-channel capabilities allow super senders to send personalized messages in highly configurable flows. For instance:

• A user could set up a cross-channel campaign to send at 9 a.m. local time in the channel the recipient prefers
• If the user has an active online sale that only lasts 24 hours, they could send out an email message at 9 a.m. local time for each recipient, with a following push notification at 5 p.m. reminding recipients that the sale is almost over
• The user could send an email message to their recipients at 9 a.m. local time, following up with a push notification reminder only if the recipient has interacted with the message

This is true cross-channel time zone-based sending, enabling you to connect across email, mobile push, and SMS in order to create complex campaigns that deliver to the right channel at the right time, regardless of where that person is.

You’re able to build one campaign, and have the channels speak to each other, knowing which users have interacted with each one, allowing you to be efficient with your sends and respectful of your subscribers’ inboxes. Each one of those subscribers and their inbox is unique, as will the campaigns they receive. It really is pushing personalization further than most marketers have been able to do before, and we’re excited to see it in action.